Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven), the title character of Joe Carnahan’s new film “Smokin’ Aces,” is a Las Vegas casino magician and organized crime groupie whose show business ambitions and fascination with the mafia have driven him to starting a little racket of his own. But Buddy’s been sloppy. In pursuit of made-manhood, he’s jumped bail, run up obscene gambling debts, and irked his old mob cronies by offering to roll over for the feds. As bounty hunters, hit men, and FBI agents converge on his Reno, Nev., penthouse suite, it looks like coked-up, delusional Buddy is the human prize in a degenerate “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.”

Director Carnahan tries to liven up the 20 solid minutes of exposition that lay out Buddy’s dilemma by cutting between skip-trace Ben Affleck in a pool hall, mob boss Alex Rocco in a Cosa Nostra compound, Special Agents Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds staking-out said compound, various assassins getting their marching orders, and Buddy himself showing his true colors in a series of narrated flash backs.

Writer Carnahan isn’t up to the task, though, and the film’s interminable opening rondo of talking heads becomes an unclear and un engaging goulash of whip-pans Sergio Leone-esque widescreen close-ups, gunshots, and punk rock chestnuts on the soundtrack It’s hard to believe that any movie executive was able to turn the necessary pages describing the film’s inertia-laden and confusing setup without reaching for a red pen or a BlackBerry.

Mr. Carnahan’s previous film 2002’s “Narc,” was a disciplined watchable, and forgivably melodramatic retro police drama featuring unusually restrained (by contemporary cop movie standards, anyway) camera work and an incendiary performance by Jason Patric. But the joyless excesses of “Smokin’ Aces” make “Narc” seem like a fluke.

Mr. Carnahan’s new film achieves neither exploitation movie overkill nor genuine pathos, though it never stops noisily and desperately reaching for both. The crude stuff just isn’t crude enough, and the sentimental stuff is so completely out of place that it appears to have stumbled into this film’s face-offs and gun battles as if it got lost between multiplex screens. Every latter-day crime and horror movie beat gets referenced or regurgitated and every imaginable camera trick gets re-aired. As bleach-bypassed, cross-processed, digitally distressed images accumulate, it’s easy to imagine a governing body called the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Film Stock withholding its seal of approval.

During the film’s opening info salvo, one of the mobster bosses describes the kind of killers he’s seeking to ice Buddy as “people who know how to behave.” But Mr. Carnahan doesn’t seem to know why anyone in his film behaves the way they do. He appears content to build his rogue’s gallery of misfits as if they were fantasy camp stand-ins for the film’s audience. Instead of being in any way convincingly professional, obsessed, or damned, everyone in the picture acts like a tourist in his or her own life.

If television is still competing with the movies for the minds and wallets of American audiences, it might be time for the movies to wave a white flag. The gracelessly telegraphed plot twists of “Smokin’ Aces” climax in a revelation that is only surprising because it has already been used (superiorly) as a subplot in an early season of “Lost.” As someone who harbors a love-hate relationship with TV, I initially felt a twinge of guilt when, greeted by the Universal logo and fanfare at the film’s start, I thought of SciFi Channel’s excellent remake of “Battlestar Galactica,” which begins with the same flourish. But by the time “Smokin’ Aces” was over, my guilt at yearning for the small screen while watching the big screen was long gone.